In this chapter Brooke hopes to demonstrate what he calls “proairetic invention” or “a focus on the generation of possibilities, rather than their elimination until all but one are gone and closure is achieved” (86).

Brooke recognizes the tension between social models of invention in rhetoric and composition and the conception of the solitary author romanticized by literary studies.

Hermeneutic invention “relies on the relative sturdiness of a final object and the negotiation of meanings within it. In other words, much of our theorizing about invention in rhetoric and composition remains bound by the particular media for which we invent, and for the most part we invent (and ask our students to invent) for the printed page” (68).

Brooks notes that the act of invention involves both the practices of reading and writing simultaneously (and the role of authorial power wrapped up in those processes); however, those actions don’t have to be on a zero-sum continuum. In other words, in the act of invention, the process of reading 75% of the time doesn’t necessarily lead to a 25% writing allocation; rather, the reader’s own motivation is the wildcard because it (might) push against the political structure of the text itself.

The function of the hermeneutic – in Barthes’ text S/Z as well as in the search engine’s like Google – is to virtualize a situation to highten our expectations (and narrative pleasure) so that when closure is achieved we are content with the new “tidy unity” we’ve been presented (76).

The function of the proairetic is to leave a system open – social bookmarking systems like delicious.com and cite-u-like provide open systems where reader/writers are able to not only catalogue information, but also:

Make bookmarking available from any location with a connection

Provide additional information (tags, notes) on sources and

Make the bookmarks available to a large group of people.

In doing these things, SBS “draw connections between users, pages, and tags. . . that generates an associational network of sources “endlessly proliferating. . . according to no overarching principle of rational design” (83). This is characteristic of the type of invention Brooke imagines for new media – proairetic invention.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Tapscott and Williams

Chapter Nine: The Wiki Workplace

This chapter highlights how the “Geek Squad” – Best Buy’s team of “geekish” computer technicians” provide a model for collaborative virtual environments as workplace communication tools.

This model preferences bottom-up collaboration strategies that highlight the knowledge of the workers on the front lines rather than a dated managerial capitalism.

As the authors note, “We are shifting from closed and hierarchichal workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm” (240).

The new manager should quit trying to establish an agenda for moving forward and recognize the agenda of the workers and serve it (243). This sounds pretty good, but only to a degree.

A new collaborative ethos is present in a generation of workers nursed on “instant messaging, chat groups, playlists, p2p, and online multiplayer video games” (247). New management would do well to adopt some of the processes.